Book Image

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine

By : Hammad Fozi, Gonçalo Marques, David Pereira, Devin Sherry
Book Image

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine

By: Hammad Fozi, Gonçalo Marques, David Pereira, Devin Sherry

Overview of this book

Game development can be both a creatively fulfilling hobby and a full-time career path. It's also an exciting way to improve your C++ skills and apply them in engaging and challenging projects. Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine starts with the basic skills you'll need to get started as a game developer. The fundamentals of game design will be explained clearly and demonstrated practically with realistic exercises. You’ll then apply what you’ve learned with challenging activities. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects: building a dodgeball game. In this project, you'll explore line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects, combining these concepts to showcase your new skills. You'll then move on to the second project; a side-scroller game, where you'll implement concepts including animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. The final project is an FPS game, where you will cover the key concepts behind creating a multiplayer environment. By the end of this Unreal Engine 4 game development book, you'll have the confidence and knowledge to get started on your own creative UE4 projects and bring your ideas to life.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Preface

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use the different aspects of the AI tools offered by Unreal Engine 4, including Blackboards, behavior trees, and AI Controllers. With a combination of both custom created Tasks and default Tasks provided by Unreal Engine 4, and with a Decorator, you were able to have the enemy AI navigate within the bounds of the Nav Mesh you added to your own level.

On top of this, you created a new Blueprint actor that allows you to add patrol points with the use of a Vector array variable. You then added a new function to this actor that selects one of these points at random, converts its location from local space into world space, and then returns this new value for use by the enemy character.

With the ability to randomly select a Patrol Point, you updated the custom BTTask_FindLocation task to find and move to the selected Patrol Point, allowing the enemy to move from each Patrol Point at random. This brought the enemy AI character to a whole...